Information on the Internet exists in the form of hyperlinks that appear in different HTML pages. A news site for example may contain headlines that are hyperlinks to their detailed exposition. Similarly, a company's intranet may contain multiple pages with several hyperlinks on each.
Custom Internet portals to display web-centric information exist (e.g., myYahoo, myLycos etc.). These portals aggregate information from different HTML sources into one interface where it can be accessed through one interface. However, the possible number of sources from which information is aggregated is fairly minimal. In typical portals, the user chooses from pre-selected information collected from a pre-determined set of information sources. The user has no control over either the sources he/she gets the content from or the information that is harvested from those web-sites. Further, the user has very little control over how the information is presented.
For example, if the user is interested in Indian politics, Soccer, and Semiconductor High Tech companies, myYahoo allows the user to configure Yahoo's news source to filter through news on these topics. However, the user must take all this content strictly from Yahoo-selected content providers. This arrangement prohibits users from choosing not just the type of content but the source of the content as well. While, for example, a user may want to be able to receive world politics news from his two favorite Indian news dailies every morning, get his Hi-Tech news coverage from Red Herring and CNET, and get sports news from Cricket.org and dailysoccer.com, access to all these sites through a prior art internet portal would be predicated on the Internet portal offering access to all of the particular site via that particular portal. This limitation forces the users to have access to only “popular” sources of information and effectively bars them from getting anything else.
What is needed is a method that allows the user to completely configure both the source and content that he/she wants on his/her own portal. The present invention overcomes the above-described disadvantages by providing a method, system, and article of manufacture that allows a user to aggregate any content or data from any source into a single customizable network user interface of his/her choice.